KILLING COVERAGE?Journalists might not cover your company's story because your web site's skimpy skimp·y adj. skimp·i·er, skimp·i·est 1. Inadequate, as in size or fullness, especially through economizing or stinting: a skimpy meal. 2. Unduly thrifty; niggardly. on facts. The Nielsen Norman Group Nielsen Norman Group is a usability consulting company created by well-known user experience experts Donald Norman, Jakob Nielsen, and Bruce Tognazzini. Besides these three principals, there are many lesser known experts in the company. The company was founded in 1998. conducted a fascinating usability How easy something is to use. Both software and Web sites can be tested for usability. Considering how difficult applications are to use and Web sites are to navigate, one would wish that more designers took this seriously. See user interface and usability lab. study in March 2001. Twenty journalists participated, and 10 corporate web sites were evaluated. The journalists attempted to use the PR areas of those sites to gather information for hypothetical Hypothetical is an adjective, meaning of or pertaining to a hypothesis. See:
The study revealed that journalists visit company web sites for these top five reasons: * Find a PR contact (name and telephone number) * Check basic facts about the company (spelling of an executive's name, his/her age, headquarters location, etc.) * Discover the company's own spin on events * Check financial information * Download images to use as illustrations in stories In this particular study, on average, journalists found the answer to each one of these simple questions 60 percent of the time. Journalists' comments included: "[The site] makes me wonder about the competence of the people in the company. Makes me think someone is being evasive e·va·sive adj. 1. Inclined or intended to evade: took evasive action. 2. Intentionally vague or ambiguous; equivocal: an evasive statement. , or that they are incompetent incompetent adj. 1) referring to a person who is not able to manage his/her affairs due to mental deficiency (lack of I.Q., deterioration, illness or psychosis) or sometimes physical disability. ." "I'm sure I saw an 'e-mail to us,' but I forgot where it was. I never know if someone is reading the e-mail. [If I had a deadline to meet,] I would go without [the company's] quote." The results of this 114-page usability study are available from the Nielsen Norman Group web site for $250. |
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